04 February 2016

USMC Pacific Theatre

This is about half of the troops needed for my Chain of Command USMC platoon for a Guadalcanal campaign. Most of the troops are from Warmodelling, but I supplemented the support teams with troops from the PSC US Heavy Weapons Box.

Last year I put a lot of work in researching the WWII Pacific theatre (I knew absolutely nothing about this aside from reading Norman Mailer's Naked and the Dead many years ago as well as watching the The Pacific mini-series). My main goal was to put together a CoC Army List for the type D USMC organization. A Type E organization list already existed but this was quite different that what was used in the 1942-43.

I game WWII in 1/72, and in metals there is not a whole lot of choice aside from Eureka and Warmodelling. There are a 2-3 other companies who make metal figures but they all looked like grunting chimpanzees to me. I had bought a couple of boxes of Waterloo 1812 plastic figures, and they were quite nice but I really am not keen to use soft plastic. Lovely slender sculpts though and they have figures for both the USMC and the Japanese. I can recommend them if you want plastics.

I had used Warmodelling for my Winter War Finns, they are nice sculpts but the casting was quite poor. I had been assured that when Battlemodels took over that the all casts were going to be re-done. Unfortunately they were not and the models suffer from the same problem with especially poor faces and a lot of flash that is almost impossible to remove.

Anyway, I went ahead and painted them up and they look OK. I am still missing 1 rifle, BAR and raider squads and these are on the way from Eureka Miniatures. These are much nicer figures, my Japanese Platoon which is next up on the painting table is made up of both Eureka and Warmodelling, the Eureka Japanese are quite nice and I am sure that their USMC figures will be equal in quality.

Each group is described in the captions and I did enjoy putting together the force.

Rifle Squad: 8 men and JL, 1 BAR

Ditto, the men were equipped with the M1903 rifle

M2, 50 cal HMG with armour penetration ability

M1917, 30 cal MMG with 5 man team

2 man Bazooka team

M1919 30 cal LMG with 3 crew

2 man Flamethrower team

Forward Observer for Heavy Mortar

5 man 60mm Mortar team

For those who are interested here is the list I developed for CoC, it has got big Rich's stamp of approval. You can download a pdf here and read about it's development here.